Chapter Forty Two
Lily crept out of her dorm with the others, leaving Cassie snoring under her duvet; as soon as the door shut behind them they began to giggle, tripping lightly down the stairs and laughing at how deeply asleep their friend was capable of being. The five girls spilled into the Great Hall and took seats at the table, chattering eagerly while they buttered toast and poured bowls of cereal; as per usual there were some strange things on the house tables and today, alongside the normal breakfast cereals, were bowls of fudge cubes and chocolate digestives. Lily had just grabbed one when the post arrived and Alice’s ditzy owl landed right on top of one edge of the bowl, tipping it over and spilling biscuits everywhere before it deposited her letter on top of them and hooted.
Marsali, missing Cassie and so having nothing to do, landed beside Lily and brandished her leg. Lily absentmindedly took the letter attached to it and put it next to her plate so that she could take it up to Cassie afterwards; it wasn’t until a few minutes later that Mary asked her whether she was going to open her letter.
“It’s not for me,” she mumbled, “it’s for Cass.”
“Well that’s weird since it has your name on it,” Mary replied, grabbing it and waving it in front of Lily’s tired face.
“Oh right,” she said. “Yeah I’ll… I’ll open that later.” She took it off Mary and put it in a pocket in her robes before standing up and heading upstairs, trailed by the others.
When she woke Cassie up the first thing her friend groaned at her was, “Why the hell would you get up when we have a free period first thing?”
Eventually Cassie emerged and she, Lily, James and Sirius sat in the common room; unfortunately having the two boys with them made it extremely hard to work. After a while, instead of working, Lily dug through the pockets and grabbed her letter, ripping it open. “What? What is it?” Cassie asked as Lily skimmed the letter quickly.
“Petunia’s engaged!” she cried.
“What? Who’d want to marry her?” Cassie shrieked, surprise, and her hatred of Petunia, overwhelming tact and making the two boys dissolve into laughter. Lily glared at her, well aware of how estranged she had become from her sister but still protective of her. “I mean… wow, who’s the lucky guy?” Lily’s oldest friend corrected.
She scanned the letter which her mother had sent her quickly before finding the name of the culprit. “Vernon Dursley,” she answered, speaking the words into the perfectly silent air before the three others spluttered back into life and started laughing again.
“Dursley? Dursley! That is the funniest name I’ve heard in my entire life!” James roared as a couple of tears threatened to fall from his eyelashes and he clutched his side in agony.
“Your sister’s going to become Petunia Dursley!” Sirius choked as Lily, rolling her eyes at their antics, crossed her arms and shot them both a nasty glare.
“I’m sure he’s a perfectly lovely man. You two are not ones to talk either.”
“I’m sorry Lils but Cassiopeia is a million times better than Vernon!” sniggered Cassie. “At least I can shorten it to something.”
“Yeah and I happen to think that Cassiopeia is a very pretty name!” Sirius agreed. “Plus, I come from a long line of Siriuses.”
“Sirii,” James added. Lily rolled her eyes again and sighed. How anyone ever managed to be such an idiot was utterly beyond her and she lacked the will to work it out.
“Maybe he comes from a long line of Vernons,” she suggested hopefully, wondering whether a family-wide curse of Vernons would be better than just one isolated incident.
“I’m sorry Lily but no one should be stupid enough to start a line of Vernons unless they just want to torture their child,” James said with a shake of his head.
Finally she cracked and began to chuckle, snorting a couple of times before breaking out into exuberant laughter. “Okay so I admit that he has a stupid name, but I’m sure he’ll be really nice!” she amended once she had managed to get her breath back. After this they fell silent - well as silent as it was possible to fall with James and Sirius there, which really meant the two girls said nothing while the boys prattled on about nothing in particular.
After a few minutes a small voice which was accompanied by an bemused shake of the head sighed, “Vernon!” and set everyone off laughing again; James and Sirius, unlikely ever to do anything quietly, received a number of confused looks as they howled, breaking up their chuckles with the odd guffaw that was so loud it sounded painful and, had Lily not been laughing along with them, would have made her wince. As it was, her own laughter was loud in her ears and the thought of her sister condemning herself to being married to a man called Vernon in her quest for normalcy amused her so much that she couldn’t help but be glad that she and Petunia had fallen out: she wan’t sure whether she would have been able to keep calm around him if she had to see him on a regular basis and the knowledge that now, considering how much her relationship with her sister had deteriorated, she was almost entitled to make fun of him made the situation even better. On top of that it occurred to her, somewhere around her fifteenth failed attempt at breathing normally, that the fact that Petunia thought Lily was stranger than a man called Vernon Dursley was some kind of poetic irony which only she could fully appreciate.
It really was an unfortunate name.
“I can’t wait to meet this man,” she said as she sat in the Great Hall one lunchtime. “I’m very intrigued by him now.”
“Same,” Alice agreed, “I want to know more. Can you pass the butter?” Lily passed it to her without looking up from her Charms book but, just as Alice’s fingers closed around it, it shot out of her hand and down towards where Sirius was sitting. “Oi!” she called down the table while Lily turned another page, “Get your dirty hands off the butter Black!” He looked at her and winked, blowing her a kiss which would make other girls melt, before pointing at Frank opposite him - who now had the butter in his hands - and shrugging. Another Summoning Charm caused the butter to fly back towards Alice and barely had she stuck her knife into it than it disappeared again.
“Please don’t start one of these wars again,” Lily sighed, resolutely not looking up from her book in the useless hope that if she couldn’t see it then it wasn’t happening.
“Please don’t read at the table Lil,” Alice replied as she swatted away a pair of bread rolls which had started dancing around her head. “I want to talk to you about this paragon of manliness… And our Potions homework.”
“Didn’t have any,” she replied.
“Slughorn got hit over the head with a suit of armour by Peeves and knocked unconscious. Wasn’t found until late yesterday afternoon,” Cassie added through a mouthful of broccoli.
“Oh so that’s why he never turned up!” Jessica exclaimed.
“So Slughorn?” Alice said. “Oh wait I mean Vernon.”
“So Vernon…” Lily replied, trailing off meaningfully.
“Have you met him?” Mary asked.
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“No idea really.” Lily slammed her book shut and shoved it back in her bag before starting her chicken. “Petunia said stay away so I’m staying away.”
“I wouldn’t want to meet a man called Vernon if you paid me,” Cassie replied, “so it’s probably for the best.”
“That I’m staying away? Yeah probably… I almost want to introduce him to James and see how he reacts though,” she said pensively. “He’s either going to be so lovely it will be as hard to answer the question of why he’s with Petunia as it will be to understand what the meaning of life is or he’s going to be so similar to her it will be painful.”
“My money’s on the painful one,” Jessica chuckled.
“I just can’t see anyone called Vernon being nice,” Alice sighed.
“Well I suppose we’ll have to wait and see. I probably won’t meet him for ages though,” she shrugged, “Petunia doesn’t want to see me so I doubt I’ll meet him before the wedding.”
“Well that’s not going to be for ages!” Mary moaned, making Lily laugh.
“Honestly Mary I really don’t think he’s going to be very impressive!”
“I mean… he’s called Vernon for Circe’s sake!” Cassie added with yet another snigger.
Eventually the girls headed off to their afternoon lessons and, in the excitement of the approaching Christmas holidays, they forgot about the ridiculous man who Lily’s ridiculous sister was marrying.
Only a few days after that the Christmas trees appeared in the Great Hall and once they had been erected - almost as if they were the signal that now Christmas really was here - the clouds above the castle promptly blanketed everything in snow. Had Lily not known that the teachers hated the trails of wet, bedraggled children wandering into their classrooms with snowflakes tumbling off their hair and complaining constantly about how cold they were she would have been inclined to believe that the sudden onslaught of blizzards were the work of a particularly powerful spell.
Even with the lure of the snow James managed to appear beside Lily various times each day, each appearance accompanied by something sweet she had spent years thinking him incapable of; often in the day it was just a quick peck as he saw her in the corridor or some notes passed between them in lessons; it wasn’t until the evening when they spent long enough together to have more than a few hurried words and, even in the Arctic conditions which had settled over Hogwarts, he was often out playing Quidditch.
Something she was more capable of understanding with her knowledge of his character, however, was when she felt the sofa she was sitting on sink and was hit by the chill emanating from James. This chill was followed by a couple of clumps of snow splattering onto the floor and two freezing hands resting on her waist as she looked up and equally cold lips pressed a kiss to hers. As they kissed, Lily felt some drips land on her skin and one ran down the side of her face. “You’re cold,” she complained when James pulled away, “and you have snow in your hair.”
He grinned at her, his cheeks flushed from what she presumed was the exertion of running around outside and also pinched pink by the cold; his hair was sticking up in every direction and every so often a small drop would fall from one of the spikes it had settled into; along with these he had an assortment of snowflakes resting in it and a couple of far larger bits trapped there, almost as if someone had been squashing miniature snowballs onto his head. Knowing that he would have been out with Sirius, Remus and Peter though she reckoned that that probably was what had happened. “We’re having a war. Do you want to come outside too?” he asked.
“No. No way. I refuse to go outside in this weather,” she replied vehemently, struggling against the heartbroken look that he was giving her. “Look!” Outside the window to which she was pointing the sky was an inky black, dotted here and there with stars and swirling snowflakes; Lily could think of nothing in the world that she would least like to do than to go outside into it and be pelted by the icy snowballs which the boys would fling at her.
“It will be fun Lily! Don’t be boring!” he moaned.
She shook her head and said, “Nope, I’m perfectly fine here in the warmth by the fire thank you.”
“Cassie’s outside.”
“Well Cassie’s an idiot,” she smiled.
“Join your idiot friend outside?” he tried again and Lily laughed.
“No thanks! I think I’ll leave you idiots to it!”
“So I’m an idiot too?” James pouted, leaning in towards her and fluttering his eyelashes as if he was about to cry.
“You’re the biggest idiot around Potter,” she sighed as her hand rested on his cheek, just as cold as the rest of him, and her lips curved up in a tiny half-smile. He closed the distance between them, eventually drawing away and saying, “Join your idiot boyfriend?”
“No thanks, I’ll leave you to be an idiot by yourself.”
“What if I do this again?” He kissed her again and Lily, to her chagrin, smiled as he did so, reciprocating eagerly and ignoring the tiny pinpricks of freezing snow which splashed against her skin and sent shivers down her spine; at least, she ignored them until one found its way down the sleeve of her jumper and she squealed.
“Is that a yes?” he asked.
“No! You got snow down my sleeve!” she cried as she fished around under the wool. “It’s the noise of even more ‘no’ than before!”
“We could hide behind a tree and do this some more though,” he suggested.
“It’ll be very hard to do that when I’m not there. And, you know, the other option is that you just stay here with me which would mean we could this here. In the warmth,” she argued. James paused and looked away as he realised that his logic had been defeated. “That’s a good point,” he admitted. “Besides, if any of them found us they’d absolutely batter us with snowballs. We’d be bombarded.”
“Exactly.”
“The other three are going to kill me,” he muttered as he settled back into the sofa and wrapped his arms around Lily.
“James… please can you take off your coat and scarf and things?” she begged. “You keep covering me with snow and it’s making me cold!”
“I can keep you warm,” he replied, his voice husky as he tried - and succeeded rather well - to sound seductive.
“Only if you take your coat off.”
Sure enough, when the boys tumbled through the portrait hole and into the common room, soaking wet and shaking snow from every part of their body while Cassie shivered and stamped it from her boots, they glared at James. The portrait hole had barely shut behind them when a cloud settled over James and began to snow persistently, refusing to budge as it covered him in snowflakes which settled everywhere again, steadfastly not melting.
“I wish I’d never agreed to go out with you,” Lily sighed as they landed on her too and James frowned at her. “Or, at the very least, that you had less annoying friends.” She shoved her book out of the reach of the cloud and wrapped her arms around James as he kissed her, both of them using one hand to swear at Remus while everyone else in the common room laughed and Sirius pretended to throw up.
Hi everyone! Sorry I haven't updated as regularly as I usually do - I've been SUPER busy and barely at home these past couple of weeks. Anyway because I'm a lovely person and it's Christmas, here's a double upload and some wintry fluff for you :)
I don't know when I'm next going to update but I'll try to have not too long a gap. No promises though because I've run out of the ten or so chapters I had stockpiled and I haven't been able to do anything this holiday (which is what I normally do with my time). Also I ought to be revising my biology so there's that...
Oh and I added a song (which I meant to add ages ago) to Chapter Forty so if you want to hear an amazing song which kind of fits with the chapter... you should definitely check that out. All of their songs are amazing and I will probably be putting a fair few up on certain chapters because some of the lyrics fit really well with the story :)